ACCA Practical Experience requirement

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The importance of experience

ACCA’s practical experience requirements are vital parts of the CAT and ACCA Qualification. They provide frameworks that support sustainable improvements in workplace performance and create more motivated and valuable employees.

As an employer of ACCA trainees, you play a vital role in ensuring trainees gain appropriate work experience and in supporting the relationship between trainees and their workplace mentors.

By supporting ACCA trainees in achieving the PER (Practical Experience Requirement), you are sending out a clear message that your organisation is committed to employees’ development. And workplace mentors – those who oversee trainees’ achievements of ACCA performance objectives – can also gain job satisfaction from seeing their mentees’ performance improve.

Practical Experience Requirement - ACCA Qualification

To achieve ACCA membership a trainee has to complete the ACCA exams, the Professional Ethics module and the PER, which includes:

completing three years’ employment in an accounting or finance-related role(s)

achieving 13 predefined performance objectives to the satisfaction of a workplace mentor

recording and reporting their PER progress through an online system.

If you are an ACCA Approved Employer – trainee development stream at gold or platinum level, you may give permission to your trainees to be exempted from completing the challenge questions associated with each of our Performance Objectives. This is at your discretion, as some employers prefer their trainees to have the discipline of completing the challenge questions. The trainees will still be required to use our online system, My Experience, to notify us of their progress towards achieving 36 months in a relevant role. To find out how to become an Approved Employer, please click on the related link at the top left hand corner of this page.

To become a Certified Accounting Technician, a trainee must complete the CAT accountancy exams, the Foundations in Professionalism module and obtain at least one year’s supervised work experience.

Trainees who register for CAT from January 2011 onwards must complete Foundations in Practical Experience Requirements (FPER). Trainees who registered for CAT before the end of 2010 can submit a Trainee Training Record (TTR) instead up to and including the 31 December 2011, or they may choose to complete the new FPER. After that date, only the FPER will be accepted.